February 2018

Video

It's been a week since I announced that the ice in the Beaufort Sea was going to come under early pressure. Here's a quick update on what has happened so far, how the forecast played out, and what the short-term conditions for this part of the Arctic will be.

As expected, the Beaufort Gyre kicked into action, big time, with winds causing large cracks in the ice pack, moving it westwards and away from the Alaskan and Canadian coasts. The massive polynyas that are left behind, get partially covered with a thin veneer of ice.

Here's an animation showing the difference between LANCE-MODIS satellite images on the first of the month and two weeks later:

Quite impressive, isn't it? As if someone threw a giant brick into it.

Here's an animation showing all days between April 1st and 14th (the file is somewhat large, apologies if it loads slowly):

Today is the winter solstice. If you live on the Northern Hemisphere of our planet Earth, today is the shortest day of the year. In a sense it's the start of the countdown towards a new melting season, with the Sun slowly creeping northward a bit every day, although the sea ice still has a couple of months to expand and thicken some more, of course.

Most of you who are interested in the Arctic, probably know that during the 2015 AGU Fall Meeting NOAA put out its annual Arctic Report Card. The report contains a lot of details on everything concerning the Arctic in 2015, and that mostly means melting. Melting sea ice, melting glaciers, snow cover loss, etc., and the consequences thereof.

There's a very good article by Yereth Rosen on the ADN Arctic Newswire website, and Robertscribbler also put a blog post up today, but if you want a quick, visual summary, there's this video that NOAA put out last week:

Some other news concerning the Arctic that received traction in the media lately, is this new paper by Yeager et al. that was published in Geophysical Research Letters two weeks ago. Its title Predicted slowdown in the rate of Atlantic sea ice loss lacks the nuance that what is actually meant is winter sea ice loss, but it's explained in the rest of the text. Strangely enough, a paper by the same authors also appeared on the Nature website last week in which the nuance is omitted entirely, in both title (Possible pause in Arctic sea-ice loss) and text. Then again, the rest of the text is behind a pay-wall (edit: never mind, I have been informed that it's just a reference to the GRL paper, not a paper in itself).

Either way, the theory is that a weakened Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) will prevent warm Atlantic waters from going deep into the Arctic, and thus in winter sea ice will expand. See this informative Science Codex article for further details and quotes from the paper's researchers, such as this one:

The lowest point has been reached on all sea ice area and extent graphs, and so the melting season has ended. I'll have more on the details later this week, but here's a quick preview of one of the most important features of this melting season, and that's the decimation of multi-year ice (MYI) on the Pacific side of the Arctic.

Here's a nice video that shows how the melting season developed and ended, based on AMSR2 data. It's made by Felicia Brise of the University of Hamburg, and I've taken the liberty to upload it to YouTube:

There's a stunning contrast between the destruction on the Pacific side of the Arctic, and the relative stable and compact situation on the Atlantic side of the Arctic, even though the ice there was thinnest at the start of the melting season. In fact, this region of first-year ice was so large that it even covered the North Pole, perhaps for the first time on record. I even speculated in my 2014/2015 Winter analysis that under the right conditions the North Pole could become ice-free this year.

But the opposite happened, the first-year ice on the Atlantic side was spared (there was also remarkably little transport of ice through Fram Strait) and it was the multi-year ice on the Pacific side that took barrage after barrage of warm, sunny weather. Now that the ice age distribution maps (developed by J. Maslanik and C. Fowler, and currently produced by M. Tschudi of CCAR) have been updated, we can see how things have proceeded since my last blog post on the subject three weeks ago:

As expected, all of the 5+-year old ice on the Pacific side of the Arctic has disappeared in truly spectacular fashion. As there wasn't that much 4-year old ice to begin with, there will be less of the oldest class of ice next year. On the other hand a lot of the 3-year old ice (green) will become 1 year older, and as said, first-year ice (dark blue) got off lightly.

Nevertheless, it seems that part of the rebound in MYI that happened since 2012 has been wiped out (something I speculated about almost two months ago in this guest blog for the Guardian Environment page). We'll know how much exactly when the NSIDC puts up their monthly analysis two weeks from now. Of course, ice age doesn't necessarily tell us how thick the ice is - this isn't our (grand)fathers' Arctic anymore - but it gives us an idea of long-term changes in the Arctic.

Another indicator is sea ice volume, both modelled and observed. To know whether 2015 will dip below rebound years 2013 and 2014, we'll also have to wait a week or two for the PIOMAS model to be updated. Either way, yet another fascinating melting season is now behind us. Thanks for watching.

Reading the latest NSIDC Greenland melt analysis, I came across this short video at the bottom of the summary. It's about melt lakes on top of the western part of the Greenland Ice Sheet and has nice visuals (you can spot Jakobshavn) and a great voice-over. If you haven't seen it yet, here's your chance:

Reposted from Peter Sinclair's Climatecrocks blog, a short CBS report that discusses research by Dr. Jennifer Francis linking Arctic warming to the erratic jet stream we’ve seen in recent extreme events:

This is one of the reasons why the Arctic is closer to us than we think, and why its sea ice loss is important for us.

Wipneus, creator of many graph and animations, has posted another gem over on the Forum.

The animation he uploaded to Youtube becomes really interesting after the end of May, when the transport through Fram Strait (one of the reasons that made the 2007 melting season so spectacular) almost completely stalls for much of the rest of the melting season:

Even though it's obvious that the lack of movement and transport was the defining theme of the 2014 melting season, it's still amazing to see it expressed so clearly in this animation. That trunk of ice that always protrudes through Fram Strait into the Greenland Sea, simply vanishes in July.

In October transport picks up again, and in the past few weeks it has been relatively strong. This is somewhat interesting because compared to 2013 a lot of the volume difference is situated close to Fram, as can be seen on this 2014-2013 thickness difference map produced by... wait for it... Wipneus:

If transport keeps up, the difference in volume (with 2013) might become smaller, but we'll have to wait and see what PIOMAS reports. In 2015.

And so, in advance, I wish everyone a happy, healthy, succesful and sustainable New Year!

Last week NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center published a two-part set of videos called A Selective History of Arctic Sea Ice Observations. These videos are short, simple, but extremely informative. And very nicely done, I may add. So now you must watch them!

Part 1:

And part 2:

NASA also released a video a couple of weeks ago, which I've overlooked, and it features my hero Dr. Tom Wagner putting the 2014 melting season in context. Is there a climate science communication award we can give this good man?

There were fewer snow and ice extremes than in 2012. Many regions and components of the Arctic environment were closer to their long-term averages, but the effects of a persistent warming trend that began over 30 years ago remain clearly evident.

The impacts of the warming climate on the physical environment during those 30 years are influencing Arctic ecosystems on the land and in the sea.

Here's a video accompanying the report:

And a longer video showing the press conference announcing the report at the 2013 AGU Fall Meeting, last Thursday:

Climate Central's Andrew Freedman, who was present at the press conference to ask questions, has another excellent summary of the report here.

It's the most interesting and actual of all potential risks tied to Arctic sea ice loss and could turn out to be one of the surest signs of changing weather patterns. Which explains the growth in interest and research.

One of the latest scientific papers on this subject, Influence of Arctic sea ice on European summer precipitation, has been written by Dr. James Screen of the University of Exeter and published
in Environmental Research Letters (via the Econnexus Blog).

The publication of the paper has been accompanied by a video, which has been put on YouTube by Peter Sinclair from the ClimateCrocks Blog, which makes it easier to embed (thank you, Peter):